First opened Tuesday, August 9, 2005
虎
とら
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
tiger
Tora is “anomalous”: Old Japanese to₁ra where the expected form was *tura.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 虎
In a sentence
猫はトラと近縁である。
Cats are related to tigers.
あれはトラではないよ。
That is not a tiger.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese to₁ra, from Proto-Japonic *tora.”
- Hedged“Pellard (2013, 92) includes to₁ra among words with o₁ excepted from the /-o-/ to /-u-/ vowel-raising rule and not originating from earlier diphthongs. According to Vovin (2021, 111), West Old Japanese *to₁ra, instead of expected *tura, is "anomalous" and possibly "a case of a sporadic analogical development".”
- “Vovin (2013) asserts that this word is same as a Silla place name 刀良 (/*tora/), which matches the Old Japanese phonographic spelling.”
Source: Wiktionary: 虎 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.